The Amazing Captain Chair

The Amazing Captain Chair? Has anything ever been titled so wrongly? I doubt it. The year was 1979 and the Captain Chair comic book was at the height of its popularity. Storylines such as the The Death of Captain Chair's Girlfriend were helping Inferno shift more comics per month than any other comic publisher. It was only natural that Inferno would want to capitalise on this success by spreading out into new market fields, especially the world of television. So, when a major television studio approached them with large sums of money and the idea of turning Captain Chair into a live action TV series, how could they refuse?

19 episodes later, everyone wished they had.

The Amazing Captain Chair definitely wasn't a perfect show. Most episodes had huge plot holes (though, given that the Matrix has a billion and made millions at the box office, maybe this can be forgiven), the Captain's outfit costume often looked very, very silly (people hadn't learnt in the 70s that whilst spandex looks good in comics, it doesn't look so good when a real person is kitted out in the stuff), and every episode featured terrible dialogue (think Lucas on a bad day) and even worse acting (think...some really bad actor).

All that said, there were things at which the series excelled. The stunts were pretty amazing (excuse the pun) given the budget. In fact, if the same amount had been spent on the writer as the stunts, then maybe this article would be a whole lot more upbeat. There were some other things the show was good at too - no idea what they are, but I'm sure there must have been...

The theme tune. Yes, it wasn't great but it was ok.

Um...

Butty boxes. Without The Amazing Captain Chair's spin-off merchandising, I'd have had to have taken my sandwiches to school in a Transformers lunch box and been forced to sit with the popular kids. But no! I had 'The Amazing Captain Chair says 'no' to burning chairs' (a statement which puzzles me to this day) plastered all over mine. Maybe if it'd said 'Captain Chair's pollaxe turns into a robot, and a wolf, and hundreds of other things which you'd never be able to recognise if it hadn't told you it was a mode in the instructions' then I'd have had more friends when I was small.

I think the real question on everyone's mind is 'how the hell did it last for 4 years?' I haven't got a clue, but Power Rangers is still going so I guess anything is possible in TV-land. You might also be wondering why it only managed to generate 19 episodes in this period. No idea about that either.

The real amazing thing about The Amazing Captain Chair is that, contrary to popular belief, the series wasn't canceled due to low ratings. Unbelieveably The Amazing Captain Chair was tied for 19th spot on the American Nielsen charts for the 1980/81 season. Unfortunately, television politics spelled trouble for Spider-Man's live action television adventures. No full season was ever ordered by the producers, only random numbers of episodes at a time (potential excuse for crappy scripts from the writers there). Captain was put into random filler time slots and was never in the same time slot for two weeks running so its a miracle that anyone watched it at all.

The final episode aired in April 1983 (two months after the previous episode), after which the the plug was pulled and the series vanished, leaving the cast condemned to low-budget movie hell (apart from one person who managed to get herself a lucrative career in films of the 'adult' variety).

At its passing the world breathed a sign of relief, and promptly tried its best to forget it had ever happened.

What happens when one man takes it upon himself to watch as many episodes of The Amazing Captain Chair as he can in the desperate search to find a good one? Read about Damian's descent into Hell...